This was a meeting-heavy week for most of the IRFS team: each of our our four focus groups (now tentatively named Data, Content, Discovery and Devices) spent some time discussing what shape our work in the next year or so should look like. It's not all talk - the Devices group ended up building . There were also events - planning one and running another; packaging of software for COMMA, and some good news on the schema.org front.
A day at the Unrulyversity
Joanne, alongside Becky and Laura from Connected Studio ran a masterclass for creative professionals this week for .
The session covered the importance of user research in the ±«Óătv's innovation process: Becky shared her experience of a Connected Studio and how user research informed her project from early idea generation to commissioning. Joanne outlined prototyping and tips for listening to your users. The participants then tried out a few of the methods using a ±«Óătv Food brief from the Connected Studio.
It was a great event, participants were very engaged and enthusiastic - and seemed reluctant to leave!
Getting ready for the Speakerthon
On January 18, 2014, we will be .
Several of us are working in the shadows to make the event a success: Tim, our newest team member, has been focusing on how we will be making the event a simple – and hopefully fun – process for all attendees. Meanwhile, Gareth has started work on the spit-and-polish needed to tidy up Snippets for the event. A few bug fixes, but mostly small new features which will make it more straightforward to find and extract the voice samples.
COMMA
James, Yves, Matt H and Chris N have been working on integration of components in the COMMA platform. This includes the API that Kite have developed, our -based job queuing system, and the Kiwi and audio waveform generator algorithms. Lots of work on code packaging and deployment, and as a result, we now have a couple of experts on the arcane craft of debian packaging.
schema.org
After two and a half years of work, the TV/Radio extension to the schema.org shared markup vocabulary was .
Weekly Web Crawl
Interesting tidbits from the web this week include smart TVs calling home, kids, screens and some shameless self-promotion:
- A nice review of our World Service Radio Archive Prototype
- “” by Frank Chimero
- … and we're helping with , alongside our friends at UCL